Vicious Trollop
by AndAllThatMishigas
Summary: Post-episode for "There's the Rub" (s2ep16) after Lorelai and Emily go to the spa and Emily dances with the silver fox and they steal the robes.


Author's Note: This story starts after Emily and Lorelai leave the spa, after bonding over stealing robes. I was watching this episode and decided that there needed to be some closure here, so I decided to take a crack at a post-episode fic. Enjoy!

**Vicious Trollop**

Emily got out of the limo, still laughing from Lorelai's comment about Emily needing to get her head examined for stealing that robe. But it was folded securely in her suitcase, which she carried to the front door of her house. She waved goodbye to her daughter as the limo drove her back to Stars Hollow.

She put her key in the door and paused. She'd only been gone one day. But quite a lot had happened in one day. Well, that was bound to happen when she forced Lorelai to spend all that time with her. It had worked out for the best, hadn't it? They'd stolen robes. And Lorelai was right, she did love that robe. She still shouldn't have done it. But she was glad she did.

When she walked inside and closed the door behind her, she was greeted unexpectedly. "Emily! I wasn't expecting you back tonight!"

Richard had just walked out of his study, holding a tumbler of scotch. Emily stared at him. In her adrenaline rush from bonding with her daughter and stealing from a spa, she had put the incident at dinner out of her mind. The guilt came flooding back. Part of her wanted to run into Richard's arms and apologize to him, but that wouldn't be the right thing to do. He'd want to know why she was apologizing, and she wasn't sure she wanted to tell him.

"Emily, are you alright?" he asked, wondering why she was silent and seemingly frozen in place.

She shook herself. "I'm fine. I have to go unpack." Emily quickly took her suitcase upstairs.

Richard followed her, curious as to her mood and if I had anything to do with why she was back an entire day early. He decided it would be easiest to just ask. "Was there a problem at the spa?"

"No," she replied simply.

He pressed further. "Then why are you back early? Didn't you have a good time?"

Emily put the suitcase up on the bench at the foot of the bed so she could unpack. She turned to face him with a sad smile. "We fought. But I had a wonderful time."

Richard smiled. "I'm so glad. Even with the fighting?"

She rolled her eyes. "Well, you know Lorelai. She whined and pouted like a child for the first few hours, devastated that she had to spend time with me. But I gave her a talking to and things were better after that."

"So why did you come back?"

Emily turned away from him, busying herself with the case, taking things out to hang them up in her closet. She smirked when she unfolded the robe.

"Where did that come from?" Richard asked, distracted from his original question by the brand-new robe she was hanging up in the bathroom.

"The spa."

"So you didn't even stay the night, but you bought a souvenir?"

"Of course not. I stole it." She grinned proudly.

Richard sputtered in surprise. "You…_stole_…Emily!"

While her husband was trying to wrap his head around this, Emily noticed that something had fallen on the floor behind it. She picked up the lipstick tube and held it tight against her heart, trying not to get too emotional. Lorelai had given her the lipstick.

"Emily! You're home early, and you _stole_? What's gotten into you?"

She held up the small tube. "This did. Lorelai gave me her lipstick. It's called Vicious Trollop."

"You're not serious."

"Yes, that's really what it's called." Her expression changed, and Emily looked down at the carpet below her feet. "And I'm afraid that in my attempts to get closer to Lorelai, I let her talk me into acting something like that." She looked back up into his eyes. "I'm sorry, Richard. I truly am."

She looked so sad and so contrite that Richard got over the fact that his prim and proper wife had lowered herself to petty theft. He put his scotch down and walked over to her, pulling his wife into his arms. "It's alright, Emily. No need to get so upset over a robe."

Emily leaned into his embrace, savoring it, for it certainly wouldn't last. "No, that's not why I'm apologizing. I did something else."

Richard pulled away slightly and frowned at her. "What did you do?"

She extricated herself from his grasp and sat down on the bed. "The menu at the spa was awful, so Lorelai convinced me to go to this nearby restaurant, and we sat at the bar and drank martinis and ate steak and it was all well and good, but…" she trailed off and put her face in her hands.

Now Richard was getting worried. He sat down beside her. "You can tell me, Emily. What happened?"

"Well, Lorelai said it was a sixty-forty bar."

"And what on earth is a sixty-forty bar?"

Emily sighed and told him, "'Sixty year old men hitting on forty year old women' is the way Lorelai described it."

"Since you are neither of those things, I'm still not seeing the problem yet."

"A man flirted with me. And Lorelai helped him. He asked me to dance and Lorelai just insisted that I go, so we danced to Fly Me To The Moon, and when the song was over, I thanked him and turned to leave, but he pulled me back for a slow dance and it took me a minute before I pulled away and left. I'm so sorry, Richard! I didn't want to, but I didn't want to disappoint Lorelai, but I just couldn't stop thinking about how I betrayed you, and I'm so, so sorry." Emily was babbling on and on, trying desperately to apologize to her husband.

Richard could see she was incredibly upset. He took her hands in his and forced her to face him. "Emily, it's alright. I take it that this man didn't do anything too unseemly, though dancing with a married woman is certainly less than honorable. And you had no intention of being unfaithful to me, is that right?"

She nodded.

He gave a small smile and kissed her forehead, pulling her into his embrace. He held her for a minute, sitting quietly together with his arms around her.

"I am sorry, Richard," she said again, quietly.

He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. "It's alright, Emily. But is this why you left early?"

"I left the restaurant immediately because I felt so guilty. I know you say it's alright, Richard, but you weren't there and that made it all that much worse for me. But Lorelai just kept insisting that it was fine and I did nothing wrong, and it just annoyed me how she wouldn't even _try_ to understand why I was upset."

"And so you fought again," Richard concluded.

"Yes. We didn't want to spend another day together. It was for the best. I just wanted to share something with her." Emily snuggled into her husband's chest, clutching at the sweater he was wearing. "I just wish she would let me love her." Her voice was muffled, but he heard her anyway.

Richard didn't know what to say to that. So he just kept holding her. He thought back to their early days as a married couple. They had waited a few years before trying for a baby; Richard wanted to get settled in his job, and Emily wanted time to establish herself as a wife before they added a child to the mix. But when they did decide they wanted to get pregnant, they had been so excited. They had both wanted nothing more than to have a child to love and teach and share their world with. Emily was a wonderful mother when Lorelai was small, but once she reached about six years old, she started drifting away. She was her own person, so unlike her parents. Richard and Emily had tried to fight that independent spirit out of her, and that was wrong, he realized now. But at this point, what could they do? But Emily never gave up. She was still trying to be a good mother. But with Lorelai, there didn't seem to be anything she could do to gain her daughter's love and trust the way she wanted.

"When did the robe theft come in?" Richard asked, breaking the silence.

Emily chuckled. "As we were about to leave. When I said I wanted to share something with her that she hadn't done with Rory, she suggested stealing the robes. It is a fabulous robe, Richard. I couldn't get over how wonderfully soft it is. So I folded it up in my suitcase. I did try to put it back or at least pay for it, but Lorelai stopped me."

"I'm glad you could share something with Lorelai, but next time, I would prefer that it was a little closer to being legal."

"So would I," Emily agreed. "But even so, I am glad we had this day together. And you know," she added, looking up at Richard with a happy glint in her eye, "I think Lorelai is too."


End file.
